Why (Senior) Engineers Struggle to Build AI Agents — Philipp Schmid, Google DeepMind

A `deleteItem` endpoint is obvious to the developer who built it. An agent only sees the function schema and docstring. Philipp Schmid from Google DeepMind argues this is why senior engineers struggle most: they carry years of implicit context that agents do not, and design tools assuming it. He names four other shifts: text replaces structured state, errors are inputs not restart triggers (especially costly when an agent has been running for 15 minutes), evals replace unit tests because the right question is how often it works not whether a fixed input always produces a fixed output, and build to delete because you will rebuild the same agent with a better model anyway. Speaker info: - https://x.com/_philschmid - https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipp-schmid-a6a2bb196/ - https://github.com/philschmid